Toward a Digital Methodology for Ideographic Criticism

This chapteridentifies the ideograph, with its focus on the single, eminently searchable key term, as a theoretical construct particularly suited to the development of digital rhetorical methods.It uses ideographic criticism—and an ideographic study of tweets that feature the term “equality—as a focal point through which to explore the methodological challenges that arise when studying vernacular discourse in online contexts, such as social media.It doing so, it identifies trends in contemporary usages of the ideograph “equality” and discusses specific deployments.